NASCAR
15 Motor Sport 
/ Betfair Education / 24 April 2008 / Leave a comment
America's favourite motor sport is NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing). It pulls bigger ratings than any other sport in the US bar the NFL and has an incredibly loyal following, particularly in the southern states. Some venues hold over 170,000 fans on raceday and sell out. Most races are conducted on banked oval circuits with speeds of over 200mph requiring drivers at the longer tracks of Daytona and Talladega to use restrictor plates to slow cars down for safety. Races at these tracks are even more competitive as straight-line speed is similar in all vehicles.
SkySports now televise the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series live on Sunday nights. The season starts in February and continues through to November. 43 cars start each race meaning traffic is a problem from the green flag. Pit stops occur regularly throughout races which vary in distance but are usually 400-500 miles. Any incident on the track results in a yellow caution flag which invariably starts a mad rush into the pits (stopping to refuel or change tyres while cars are travelling at 1/3 pace under a caution flag is much better than going a lap down while the race is at full pace).
The Daytona 500 is the marquee event of NASCAR, and peculiarly, starts the season. The evenness of this code of motor racing was displayed in 2008 when a caution flag late in the race meant the race restarted with just three laps left to run (a NASCAR race cannot finish under a yellow flag - the laps remaining figure is frozen so that at least two laps are run under a green flag complete the race). 32 cars were still on the lead lap, and any of 10 cars could have won the race. Ryan Newman, a 25/1 shot pre-race, took advantage of the slipstream and then a shunt from behind by a teammate to get the momentum to overtake the leading cars and cross the finish line first - the only time in the entire race he led the field.
In 1979, the Daytona 500 became the first stock car race that was nationally televised from flag to flag on CBS. The leaders going into the last lap, Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison, wrecked on the backstretch while dicing for the lead, allowing Richard Petty to pass them both and win the race. Immediately, Yarborough, Allison, and Allison's brother Bobby were engaged in a fistfight on national television. This underlined the drama and emotion of the sport and increased its broadcast marketability. Luckily for NASCAR, the race coincided with a major snowstorm along the United States' eastern seaboard, successfully introducing much of the captive audience to the sport.
What to look for:
A good qualifying result doesn't mean a lot - with 200 laps required in most races, the difference between 1st and 20th on the grid is minimal so don't go lumping on a driver just because he is on the front row. Tracks have individual characteristics - Daytona is long and requires restrictor plates, Watkins Glen is a road circuit with left and right turns rather than an oval, Bristol is a short-track (about half a mile long) meaning the backmarkers are half a lap behind before they've even started.
The cars are almost identical and the drivers are all good. What often makes the difference are the pit crew and the spotters. When there's a mad charge for pit lane under a caution flag, the order they leave the pits is the order they restart the race, so losing half a second changing a tyre that doesn't want to come off is costly. The spotter is effectively the mirrors for a driver. Drivers only have a small rear-view mirror and can't see much of what goes on around them so they each have a spotter in the infield or grandstand who is constantly telling them where their rivals are, if they have space on their outside etc. Cars race so close together that the slightest touch can send a car into the wall and cause chaos to the drivers behind.
Bookies' odds for race winner are usually set in Vegas and to ridiculously high percentages (150% ). It's a great market to lay many drivers in as there will always be people have their favourite drivers or see the race on TV and decide to throw a fiver on it for an interest, without really knowing what the true price is. With the racing so close, you should never see a driver trading odds-on before the last 20 laps at most.
Sites to visit
NASCAR - live scoring, driver profiles, news and statistics
Covers.com NASCAR coverage - previews, news and statistics from a betting angle
Yahoo Sports NASCAR coverage - news and results
